Sunday, April 19, 2009

Why is Illinois Judge Stuttley Giving a Symposium on So-called “Parental Alienation Syndrome” and Taking Children from Moms?

Jeffery Leving, well known Father’s Rights pimp lawyer in Chicago (I gag when I hear his “dad’s rights” commercials on WBBM-AM at night), has a video of a judge giving a “symposium” on the so-called “Parental Alienation Syndrome.”

Chief Judge Michael Stuttley, Cook County Circuit Court, 6th Municipal District/Markham, concludes his lecture on Parental Alienation Syndrome on his video. Judge Stuttley seems very proud to be taking kids from mothers and giving them to fathers. In reviewing the Illinois Code of Judicial Conduct, it appears that Judge Stuttley is in violation with several canons associated with the code. If you have lost your children in his court due to claims of so-called “parental alienation”, you are definitely not alone. Consider pursuing a judicial complaint through the appropriate channels, a motion to disqualify him from your case, and an appeal of his decision against you.

If Judge Stuttley REALLY had a clue about “parental alienation” he would know about these statements:

Although PAS may be hailed as a “syndrome” . . . in fact it is the product of anecdotal evidence gathered from Dr. Gardner’s own practice. [...] PAS is based primarily upon two notions, neither of which has a foundation in empirical research. […] PAS is an untested theory that, unchallenged, can have far-reaching consequences for children seeking protection and legal vindication in courts of law.”

PAS’s twenty-year run in American courts is an embarrassing chapter in the history of evidentiary law. It reflects the wholesale failure of legal professionals entrusted with evidentiary gate-keeping intended to guard legal processes from the taint of pseudo-science…. As a matter of science, law, and policy PAS should remain inadmissible in American courts.

2006 – TheNational Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judgesalso discredited the theory. It stated:

The discredited “diagnosis” of “PAS” (or allegation of “parental alienation”), quite apart from its scientific invalidity, inappropriately asks the court to assume that the children’s behaviors and attitudes toward the parent who claims to be “alienated” have no grounding in reality. It also diverts attention away from the behaviors of the abusive parent, who may have directly influenced the children’s responses by acting in violent, disrespectful, intimidating, humiliating and/or discrediting ways toward the children themselves, or the children’s other parent.

Parental Alienation Syndrome, which has no scientific basis whatsoever, is most often used against women in custody cases including by ex-husbands with documented histories of domestic violence against their ex-wife and/or children. It does not mean “alienated parent” as the author above implies, it means that a parent, usually a mother, is being accused in court of alienating her child or children from their father by being truthful about the danger they pose to their child’s physical safety or the mother’s safety. Courts seem to love the made up syndrome as an excuse to give custody rights or shared custody to men who have abused their wives and/or children, but until now there has been no official status for this made up syndrome. If it makes it into the DSM’s next version, divorce lawyers and abusive divorcing spouses will have even more ability to continue to abuse their exes through the courts and to put their children in danger in some cases. (More business for Jeffery). Women will continue to be labelled hysterical for reacting normally to horrible experiences such as discovering their children have been sexually abused by their father but now there will be so called scientific backing for these made up claims in court.

Up for inclusion again is making women’s menstrual cycles into a psychiatric condition also. (WTF!) We now have many more women psychiatrists than we did when the first DSM came out, why do women continue to be the target of sexist and destructive labelling by the American Psychiatric Association behind closed doors even so? While there is a dearth of concern about psychiatry and its destructive effect on women over the ages today, nothing like the great work that was done in the ’70’s and 80’s is out there now and in fact many feminist blogs are guilty of the same continuation of prejudice against people with psychiatric labels as the rest of society, forgetting their history altogether in my personal opinion, maybe the threat to custody of children will start to wake feminists up to the destructive and continuing sexist power of psychiatry over the lives of women in the United States.

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